The Windowpane
by BohemianTwinkle
Summary: ...stuck in his unearthly state, wondering or perhaps fearing to remember how he got there.


**Author's note: **This is straight from the heart. My world is non existent.

'For most of history, anonymous was a woman' - Virginia Woolf

* * *

_Can you believe this is happening?  
You can't understand how it can be real  
There's nothing left inside  
Nothing left to feel  
Just another shatter in your core  
No need to worry  
You know it won't go away__Instead we say  
Pain, pain go away  
Come again another day_

His face stares out from behind a dirty windowpane. A face that once glittered with all that is good and pure, now marred in tragedy, darkened by jealousy, cracked and shattered by fate. You can see him, if you look hard enough, staring down through the dirty and clouded windowpane with eyes so still and frozen, no tell tale signs of life inside them apart from the salty droplets of water that meander down his cheeks.

He stares into another world entirely, his gazing eyes never reaching the dirty street below but cast away through time and space to memories much more fitting to haunt the deteriorating poet. Memories that were never meant to be memories tucked away in the shadows and cobwebs of a broken heart. Memories that were supposed to be built on and thought of fondly by firelight with entwined arms and merging lips. Not left to haunt and torture, to mock and cause more pain.

Sometimes nursery rhymes brush across his mind and he remembers nicer, happier times, when the world didn't have so many consequences and strings attached. When a simple, innocent chortle was enough to make the inconveniences cause much less trouble or even go away completely. But it seems, times such as those are destined to end sometime when the world pulls away its smiling mask and shows its dark and ugly face.

_You find that you can't say it out loud  
It's a crime to whisper it in your head  
Instead you scratch words into the floor  
Not dead not dead not dead  
Smothering the screams inside your throat  
Bubbling, brewing  
Slithering out as silence_

_As we say  
__Pain, pain go away  
__Come again another day_

His mind has weakened over the months since the night that ended more than one life, as it turned out. It has become so brittle, like sheets of glass slowly dissolving away into the leeching river of blood and pain below, blackened blue running through his veins becoming the only sign of real human life in him, for his words are no longer words of incomparable poetry proclaimed to the watching stars, but wary, grieving words uttered under breath of Absinthe and stale saliva. He'll never say out aloud what happened to him, not even in his head; it is an unspoken, unthought of fact neither in his mind nor in his heart. It seems he forgot or shut out what happened and is now stuck in his unearthly state, wondering or perhaps fearing to remember how he got there.

But, if you do not already know, you can find out by reading the words splintered in his windowsill, or painted in shaky lines on the windowpane. Not Dead. He has written them on every surface, every sheet of paper and engraved in every wall, every floorboard of his decaying garret, written them in floundering moments of misery and disbelief and now looks at them as though they are in a foreign language, one no man in the world could ever learn to speak or read. Maybe he does not even remember writing them, and if you watched through a hole in the ceiling like his little painter friend, you would see him pawing at the walls and running his fingers over the letters, trying to pronounce them with his own mouth with not the slightest sound coming out and the tears down his face are like the raindrops outside.

_Why don't we just sit and stare?  
__Don't want to be strong; don't want to put on a face  
__It's because we're so naive, can't understand, don't know how  
__The world can see our eyes become empty space  
__There's no stars hanging in the sky  
__Frozen in blackness  
__Painted inky blue_

_Pain, pain go away  
__Come again another day_

As the first days turned into the cold months of winter he slowly became a recluse and the grimy streets of Monmartre never saw his face again, save for a shadowy outline like a painted portrait left out in the rain with all the colours faded and blurred by water looking out from behind a dirty windowpane. He sits and he gazes, like a rag doll left slumped upon the windowsill with glass button eyes endlessly staring into nothing, blind. His hands lay limp and almost frozen over with frost against the brittle wood of the sill, his lips chapped and parched to match the whiteness of his face and bloodshot of his empty eyes.

When the snow comes down and the storm clouds gather in the depths of the winter months he does not move to light a fire, but sits in the dark with a blanket draped over his shoulders by his faithful little painter friend and takes no notice as his breath rattles from his throat in heavy drones. He has become sick, as expected and an empty shell of life now never needing to eat or sleep, with his mind elsewhere and his heart so broken it mightn't even be inside his chest anymore.

_Yes we know, there's no changing  
__That's what hurts the most  
__Yes we know, it's time to keep on moving  
__That's what hurts the most  
__Yes we know, it's not a dream  
__That's what hurts the most  
__Yes we know it's not a dream  
__That's what hurts the most_

Those that live in the old dancehall that was once, for a brief time turned into a Theatre Royale, still remember the enchanted boy wrote a story and sung a song all in the name of love. The boy who was brave enough and innocent enough to love one of their kind and save her. He became a mythical trace of existence with a voice that still echoes through the hall when the wind blows idly through the windows, with tears that are still wet on the stage floorboards.

Sometimes they see him, as they wander drunkenly through the damp streets, with faded and deadened eyes looking out from behind a dirty windowpane.


End file.
